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They said no more for a moment, and each was now acutely aware of
the other. Ann Veronica was excited and puzzled, with a sense of
a strange and disconcerting new light breaking over her relations
with Ramage. She had never thought of him at all in that way
before. It did not shock her; it amazed her, interested her
beyond measure. But also this must not go on. She felt he was
going to say something more--something still more personal and
intimate. She was curious, and at the same time clearly resolved
she must not hear it. She felt she must get him talking upon some
impersonal theme at any cost. She snatched about in her mind.
"What is the exact force of a motif?" she asked at random.
"Before I heard much Wagnerian music I heard enthusiastic
descriptions of it from a mistress I didn't like at school. She
gave me an impression of a sort of patched quilt; little bits of
patterned stuff coming up again and again."
She stopped with an air of interrogation.
Ramage looked at her for a long and discriminating interval
without speaking. He seemed to be hesitating between two courses
of action. "I don't know much about the technique of music," he
said at last, with his eyes upon her. "It's a matter of feeling
with me."
He contradicted himself by plunging into an exposition of motifs.
By a tacit agreement they ignored the significant thing between
them, ignored the slipping away of the ground on which they had
stood together hitherto. . . .
All through the love music of the second act, until the hunting
horns of Mark break in upon the dream, Ann Veronica's
consciousness was flooded with the perception of a man close
beside her, preparing some new thing to say to her, preparing,
perhaps, to touch her, stretching hungry invisible tentacles
about her. She tried to think what she should do in this
eventuality or that. Her mind had been and was full of the
thought of Capes, a huge generalized Capes-lover. And in some
incomprehensible way, Ramage was confused with Capes; she had a
grotesque disposition to persuade herself that this was really
Capes who surrounded her, as it were, with wings of desire. The
fact that it was her trusted friend making illicit love to her
remained, in spite of all her effort, an insignificant thing in
her mind. The music confused and distracted her, and made her
struggle against a feeling of intoxication. Her head swam. That
was the inconvenience of it; her head was swimming. The music
throbbed into the warnings that preceded the king's irruption.
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